Why should founders “feel the dirt”?

One [of my mantras] is “feel the dirt” or, put your hands in the dirt. It's just the spirit with which I approach the places I live and the things I do which is to try to not live and do them at a superficial level. Two examples of that on a personal level, when I moved to New York after college, I lived in East Village, I don't know, I hung out with a lot of the people I hung out with from university and I realised I was living a very very small and superficial version of what New York city was and I just wanted to get to know the city better.

Most people I hung out with were not from New York city. It was one of many versions of New York city. And so I started volunteering very actively and I got involved with an organisation called New York Cares. I would wake up on a Sunday morning, take a bus to Staten island, do something at a local school of kids and come back. But I just had the drive to actually dig levels deeper and get to know the city and the people within it in the different places. I think that that translates to me as a founder in that I will never stop having user conversations. I will never stop using the product myself. And I swear to that. No matter how big we get, I never want to lose touch with every layer of our organisation down to obviously the end user experience.